Classical historicism at no time asserted that the universe was devoid of rational or ethical purpose, but expressed its faith that the apparent expressions of irrationality, individual spontaneity, and will were manifestations of an underlying ethical order. This faith assumed the existence of a God who at each moment in history, actively, created the mysterious balance which linked each sovereign monad to the total whole. The rise of a naturalistic world view in the nineteenth century, which accompanied the mechanization of life, made this faith steadily less convincing. The introduction of the historicist outlook into social and humanistic studies in the nineteenth century contributed to the destruction of the idealistic assumptions of historicist philosophy. By studying each institution, each idea or ideal as a one-time event linked to a specific historical and cultural setting, historicism prepared the way for the relativization of all value. Moreover, it led to the position that the Geisteswissenschaften, the natural sciences, must themselves be “wertfreie Wissenschaften” (value-free sciences) which study values as cultural phenomena devoid of any innate or transcendent validity. The “crisis of historicism” of which Troeltsch spoke revolved around the increasing realization by social theorists and philosophers that the rigorous application of historical method ultimately led to the destruction of all certain knowledge about man and to the relativization of all firm values, an apparently inescapable dilemma resulting from man’s inability to transcend the flux of history.
If the historicist approach remained relatively intact in German historiography into the post-World War I period, in contrast to the social sciences, this undoubtedly reflected the deep emotional commitment of historians not only to the German idealistic tradition but also to the Prussian state. Social theorists of the twentieth century were confronted by the shambles of the idealistic tradition. The historians, on the other hand, lived amidst political realities in which a good deal of the traditional institutional structure had remained intact. World War I led Friedrich Meinecke to re-examine the optimistic notions regarding the harmony of ethics and power. Walter Gotz in the 1920’s called for a thorough re-examination of the political presuppositions of German historiography. Otto Hintze sought to introduce a broad, comparative, sociological note into the state-oriented historiography of the German school. For the majority of German historians, however, defeat and war-guilt theses seemed to provide new incentives to defend the Bismarckian solution and the rightness of German intellectual traditions. The Nazi experience, variously interpreted by German historians both as a repudiation and as a radicalization of these traditions, nevertheless led a great deal of the German academic profession to question seriously, for the first time, the age-old association of liberty with the traditional authoritarian state.
World War II finally destroyed much of the institutional framework within which historicism had arisen. The Bismarckian state was broken apart. Prussia was dissolved as a political unit. East Elbia was either lost to Germany entirely or underwent profound social transformation. The new international realities no longer permitted Germany to play the role of a major power. In Eastern Germany, historiography became a function of a new authoritarian state based upon very different ideological foundations. In Western Germany, democratically as well as conservatively oriented historians, at least in the first two decades after the war, were obliged by the new constellation of realities to identify German political interests with those of the Western democracies. The ideological dichotomy of Germany and Western Europe had lost a good deal of its political foundation. Doubtlessly, the disillusion with the past, the postwar prosperity, the emergence of a consumer-oriented society, and the stability of parliamentary government in the Federal Republic all contributed to the consolidation of an ethos in closer harmony with the realities of a modern mass society. Although older patterns of historical thought and historiographical practice have remained alive in Germany, the traumatic experience of Nazi dictatorship and defeat, and the less traumatic transformation of German realities in postwar Germany, have led to a crisis of conscience among German historians and a re-examination of traditional methodological conceptions and political values.
The present work begins with the divergence of German historical thought from the main patterns of European thought at the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. It ends on a mildly hopeful note in regard to the return of broad segments of German opinion to the main streams of Western thought. The final part of Chapter VIII will assess to what extent a revision of basic historical concepts has taken place in Germany since 1945. The German historiographical situation is too complex to reduce it to a common denominator; the classical historical tradition is still very much alive today. For the first time, however, a significant number of historians, particularly in works on the recent past, have written from the standpoint of democratic commitments. Also for the first time, a larger number of historians have sought to come to grips with the realities of a technological mass society, and to integrate the methods of the historian with those of the political scientist and the sociologist.
A return to generally Western traditions of thought in the midtwentieth century no longer means a return to Enlightenment conceptions of natural law. The image of the “West” portrayed by German historians especially since World War I (e.g., Troeltsch) was hopelessly antiquated and failed to recognize the extent to which romanticism, the progress of the natural sciences, the mechanization of life and thought in the nineteenth century, had eroded the Enlightenment heritage. By different paths, main currents of German and other European thought had converged upon a similar point. Historical relativism was not restricted to Germany. Much of modern thought reflected a profound awareness of the apparent ethical meaninglessness of the world, the irrationality of man, and the absurdity of history. Historical reason thus participated in the destruction of faith in reason and purpose in human affairs. If the book treats historicism historically, as a movement of thought, the first section of the concluding chapter seeks to deal with the historicist and relativistic critique of natural law on theoretical grounds. The question is cautiously raised whether there are no elements of the Enlightenment notion of a constant, rational element in man and history which survive this critique, and continue to retain a degree of validity and relevance for historical and political thought.
[ CHAPTER II ]
The Origins of German Historicism
THE TRANSFORMATION OF GERMAN HISTORICAL THOUGHT FROM HERDER’S COSMOPOLITAN CULTURE-ORIENTED NATIONALISM TO THE STATECENTERED EXCLUSIVE NATIONALISM OF THE WARS OF LIBERATION.
IT is difficult to set even an approximate date for the beginnings of historicism. If we mean by historicism an approach to history which seeks to re-create the past wie es eigentlich gewesen and to recapture the unique qualities of an historical situation, then a great deal of narrative history written from a secular standpoint has been historicist in outlook since Classical Antiquity. The idea that historical research, with its concern for detail and individuality, basically differed from the generalizing and classificatory approach of the natural sciences was well known long before the eighteenth century. Aristotle already had observed that historical statements deal with “singulars” rather than with “universals.”1
The basic elements of historical method were well established in the eighteenth century and recognized even by the rationalists. Since the age of humanism, scholarship, especially as carried on in the academies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, had recognized criteria for the critical analysis of sources. It is true that there was not yet a well-established tradition of critical inquiry and that the great “pragmatic” historians of the Enlightenment, men such as Voltaire and Gibbon, tended to construct grandiose syntheses based upon inadequate evidence. The scholars, on the other hand, accumulated data with insufficient attention to the continuity and development of institutions.2 But the careful re-creation of individual reality is by no means in contradiction with natural law theory. To “understand” is not yet to “condone” or to “accept.” It is possible to portray an individual in his individuality with his unique values, and yet measure him by standards of right and wrong applicable to a broader humanity.
If, however, like Friedrich Meinecke, we understand historicism not merely as